AfriGeneas Books~Authors~Reviews Forum

THE GRAVES ARE NOT YET FULL~review

Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa
By Bill Berkeley
Basic Books: 310 pp.

[quoting] The African catastrophe gnaws and gnaws at the moral imagination of every decent person in the West. And for good reason. Put starkly, the bad news from the continent seems exponentially worse than that coming from any other part of the world, and the good news, such as it is, is in such short supply. In an era when, burst stock market bubble or no burst stock market bubble, the received wisdom in the rich world is that globalization will sooner or later make every part of the world better off, Africa seems to stand as the terrible exception. What Bill Berkeley has done, in a series of brilliantly reported vignettes, is to try to understand the deep underlying causes of the worst cases of ethnic and political strife in Africa--Liberia, Sudan, Congo, South Africa in the death throes of apartheid--and offer a way of thinking about these disasters that serves the cause of hope rather than of despair. "The Graves Are Not Yet Full" is a tour de force, and as reporting it is essential reading for anyone concerned with understanding Africa.
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